Many of us were waiting patiently for pricing information on Azure Stack. We had already heard that it would be CSP, makes sense, and we had been told it would cost anywhere from 0-100% of the cost of running in Azure. So now, we know the pricing.

I am moving a customer from a traditional hosting provider to Microsoft Azure. They have a traditional setup with ADDS, file servers and a RDP Session host. In their current setup they complain about performance, so i wanted to test out if we could run some kind of scaling in Azure based on time or usage.

After testing disk performance in the new D-Series VM’s i decided to take a look at what other ways there were for maximizing performance on the disk system on an Azure VM.

First of some baseline needs to be establised, i attached a simple disk to the VM and initialized it as a GPT disk. Then i ran SQLIO as descriped in my previous post and to get something nice to look at, i included CrystalDiskMark, this was the result.